by Richard Lawler
First of all let me express my thanks to Mike Coop and Mark Wagner (any anyone else involved behind the scenes) for all the legwork and administration. Great job folks.
The Saturday barbecue was a great idea and came in handy as I had exceeded my refrigeration capabilities by that time.
I saw lots of wildlife including rabbits, quail, hawks, eagles and probably a hundred deer. But I missed the pigs this year. (I guess the Paso Robles Pork and Almond Festival was a great success though.)
Thursday night I did pure observing. The highlight was the views of Saturn after about 2 am. Just splendid.
During the day we had quite a collection of solar equipment assembled. I had my SolarMax 40 as did two other people near me. A few people also had various white light filters, and another observer near me had a DayStar cleverly mounted on a polar oriented TV85 using a mirror (a secondary recycled from a Coulter I think) to follow the sun.
Friday and Saturday I primarily did imaging. I was careful to drink plenty of coffee and eat plenty of Carl and Kimi Larson's brownies though as some of the SoCal contingent where threatening to do some imager tipping in the middle of night. So no dozing off for me.
I still have to process my image data, but the equipment was all working well. Hopefully the results will turn out good. I'll post a link if I come up with anything worth sharing.
It was a great time. I never did successfully bag The Cheese Burger though. Maybe next year...